How to Speed Up the Playstation 3

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There’s a lot to love about the PS3, but install times isn’t one of them. Many games require lengthy installs before you get to play, and after waiting an eternity for a large demo to download, you get to stare at a progress bar while it installs. Yuck. Does the speedy 80GB Intel X-25 SSD speed this up?

The short answer is—not really. Installing games from the Blu-ray disc to the hard drive is sometimes a little faster with the SSD drive, but only by a very small amount. The limiting factor here is clearly the read performance of the Blu-ray drive (which is the entire reason so many games require hard disk installs in the first place). The Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway demo does install about 40% faster, though. This is a downloaded demo, reading the download package off the hard drive, so the Blu-ray read speed isn’t an issue.

If you want to cut those five-minute-plus install times down to a tolerable level, a faster hard drive or SSD isn’t the way to go. In fact, with the Blu-ray drive being the limitation here, we’re not sure there is much you can do about it. Continued…

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